The Heart of the Thing

            In Leviticus 16 and 17, we come to the heart of the book.  By God’s own declaration, Israel is His holy people (Ex. 19:6).  By their own actions, they are faithless idolaters (Ex. 32).  How will a sinful people, with sinful leaders, participate in the holiness of their God?  They will participate in that holiness through atonement: lesser sacrifices that we have already read about and the great day of atonement described in ch. 16.  The meaning of so many blood sacrifices is explained here, too.  “The life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev. 17:11).  Follow the logic:  the wages of sin is death (Gen. 2:17; Rom. 6:23).  The life is in the blood.  Putting to death and pouring out the blood equals a substitution:  in this case, an animal’s death where a human ought to have died.

            However, there are two limitations to this system.  First, the book of Hebrews notes, “According to this arrangement, gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshipper” (Hebrews 9:9).  Second, the writer of Hebrews also notes that the sacrificial system had to be repeated year after year and day after day (Heb. 9:25-26)  Put those two things another way:  the death of a bull or a goat or a dove can’t repay the debt incurred when man sinned.  These sacrifices are only foreshadowings of the great atoning sacrifice—the once-for-all death of Jesus.  Here in the one who was fully and perfectly human and fully and perfectly God there is the atonement that was needed, the Life that alone could count for all lost human lives.  If we hope to understand Leviticus at all, we have to see the cross behind it.

Updated from 2/4/2011